What data should your nonprofit stop collecting right now?

Let’s start with something a little uncomfortable: most women’s rights organizations are collecting more information about the people they serve than they actually need. Not out of bad intentions—usually out of habit, or because the intake form was built years ago and nobody’s questioned it since, or because someone once said “we might need this later.”

But for organizations serving survivors of domestic violence, people seeking reproductive healthcare, or clients navigating legal systems that don’t always protect them—unnecessary data isn’t just a compliance issue. It’s a safety issue.

Here’s a practical look at what to reconsider.

The intake form problem

Intake forms are where most of the damage happens. They’re often the first point of contact between your organization and someone who may be in a vulnerable, high-stakes situation—and they tend to accumulate fields over time without anyone asking whether each one is actually necessary.

Some of the most common offenders:

Full date of birth—Unless you’re providing a service with a strict age requirement, you probably don’t need a full birthdate. What you usually actually need is an age range, or confirmation that someone is over 18. A full date of birth is a piece of personally identifiable information that can be used to locate or identify someone—and storing it creates risk.

Full legal name—This one is context-dependent, but worth examining. Many organizations default to collecting full legal names out of habit. If you’re providing services where legal name isn’t necessary—a support group, a resource library, a crisis line—consider whether a first name, or even no name at all, would serve just as well.

Gender and pronouns—This is a nuanced one. For organizations serving LGBTQ+ communities, collecting gender identity and pronouns can be important and affirming. But it’s also sensitive data—particularly for trans and nonbinary people in environments where that information could be used against them. If you collect it, be deliberate about why, how it’s stored, and who can access it.

Full home address—For survivors of domestic violence or people in unsafe housing situations, a home address is genuinely dangerous data to have sitting in a form submission or a spreadsheet. Ask yourself: do you actually need a full address, or do you need a general service area, or just a way to contact them? If you do need an address for service delivery, think carefully about how it’s stored and who has access to it.

Titles and honorifics—Low-stakes compared to the above, but worth noting—fields like “Dr./Mr./Mrs./Ms.” are often just vestigial form elements that collect gender information under a different label. If you don’t have a specific reason to collect this, remove it.

The “we might need it later” trap

One of the most common reasons organizations collect more data than they need is future-proofing. Someone once thought “it would be useful to know our clients’ income levels” or “we should track how people heard about us”—and now those fields live in the intake form forever, collecting data that nobody’s actually looking at.

The principle to apply here is data minimization: only collect what you actively use for a specific, defined purpose. If you can’t point to a concrete use for a piece of information, don’t collect it. Not only does this reduce your risk exposure, it also makes your forms shorter and less overwhelming for the people filling them out—which, for someone in a crisis, matters enormously.

A useful exercise: go through your intake form field by field and ask, for each one, “what do we do with this information?” If the answer is “nothing, really”—cut it.

The invisible data problem: your website

Intake forms are the obvious place to look, but your website may be collecting data you’re not even aware of.

Social media pixels. If you have a Facebook pixel, a TikTok pixel, or similar tracking code on your site, you are allowing those platforms to collect information about every person who visits your website—including people who may have come looking for help with a DV situation, an abortion, or immigration status. That data can be used for ad targeting, and in some cases may be accessible to third parties including law enforcement. For most women’s rights organizations, this is an unacceptable risk. Remove them.

Social sharing buttons. Even if you don't have a pixel, embedded social sharing buttons (the little “share on Facebook” icons) often load third-party scripts that track visitors. If you want people to be able to share your content, a plain text link does the job without the surveillance infrastructure.

Analytics tools. Most websites use some form of analytics to understand how people find them and what they do once they arrive. That’s legitimate—you need to know if your resources are being found and used. But not all analytics tools are created equal.

Google Analytics is the most widely used option, and if you’re already using it, the good news is that the current version (GA4) automatically anonymizes IP addresses by default—you don’t have to do anything to enable that. What you should do is check your data retention settings: GA4 defaults to storing user-level data for two months, and you can verify or reduce that in your property settings under Data Settings > Data Retention. You should also make sure Google Signals is turned off if you’re not actively using it, as it enables cross-site tracking and behavioral advertising features you almost certainly don’t need. Google has a number of privacy options available for Google Analytics, they just might need to be enabled/disabled (depending what they are).

If you’re setting up analytics from scratch, or considering switching, there are privacy-focused alternatives worth knowing about. Plausible and Fathom are both cookie-free, don’t collect personal data, and are fully GDPR-compliant by design. They give you the traffic information you actually need—where people are coming from, which pages they visit, what’s working—without the broader surveillance infrastructure. Both have paid plans starting around $9–15/month, which for most small organizations is a reasonable trade for significantly better privacy posture.

Where to start

If this feels overwhelming, don’t try to fix everything at once. Start with your intake form, because that’s where the most sensitive data lives and where your risk is highest. Go field by field, apply the “what do we do with this?” test, and remove anything that doesn’t have a clear answer.

Then take a look at your website’s third-party scripts—most platforms make it relatively easy to see what’s loading. If you see social pixels, remove them. If you’re not sure what’s there or how to evaluate it, that’s exactly the kind of thing I can help with. Get in touch and we can take a look together.

The goal isn’t a perfect system. It’s a deliberate one—where every piece of data you collect is there for a reason, and the people you serve aren’t carrying more risk than they have to.